pigeonburger
1mo ago
We're all just actors in a play. We enter stage, say our lines, and exit stage. The surest way to be disappointed with this is to try to direct from the stage.
pigeonburger
29d ago
I think it's because it's the only governing body on the planet that is ideologically bound to engage in total warfare against an opponent that dominates it in every way, so that losing in ways that creates a PR nightmare for their opponent is the only possible victory they can get.
How does a woman make it to her 30s without landing in a stable, committed relationship?
Quite easily. I'll let you in on an insight most men haven't realized yet.
You know how you often hear women complain "Where are all the good men?" and then totally a catch yet perenially single nerdy guy complain "Uhhh, we're right here, you just ignore us!"
The equivalent women exist. The equivalents to men who have hobbies and friend groups that don't intersect with the people they probably should be matching with. Dating's "dark matter", the women we all imagine probably exist yet no one can find. The problem is that men expect that the equivalent for women is within the same hobbies, that the match for lonely nerdy guys into anime should be lonely nerdy girls into anime. But nerdy girls into anime are rarely lonely. But I found them. I found the elusive missing good women.
The equivalents are nerdy bookish/library girls. There are a lot of women who spend their time in libraries, reading high or low brow stuff. Recently I had to do some work for a client that works in the library space, and I quickly realized that 90% of the employees there were quiet, nerdy (and no, certainly not unattractive) girls. I had to deal with pretty much all of the employees and most of them seemed shy and unaccustomed to dealing with a "normie" guy like me.
Had I made this discovery in my bachelor days, it probably would have completely changed how I approach dating.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
That's an interesting way to frame it. So it's the vigilantism equivalent of financial punishment/reward: "I don't trust the institutions to deal with this properly so I will financially reward the side I believe should be winning here".
The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored" follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but the bailey version used to dismiss other people's difficulty in losing weight as only self-control issues, which you've expressed as "You eat too much and you dont exercise enough", does not, because exercise is not the only way calories are output, fat is not the only way an input can be stored and absorbtion rates can vary.
pigeonburger
24d ago
It's just good PR. There's a lot of uninformed takes on AI out there. And there are some less uninformed takes that Big Tech would like to dispute. The Vatican has a large amount of influence on some people. Those people adopting the wrong opinions, from the perspective of Big Tech, could eventually trickle down into legislation, or at least into public attitudes. And as much as we would like to think PR should not be necessary, it's like lawyers; a world where it wasn't necessary to do PR would be sunshine and rainbows, but that's not the world we live in. If you don't do PR you're still going to be on the recieving of other people's PR (negative against you, or positive for them in cases where you are competing for scarce ressources like government investment or the public's discretionary spending).
Ultimately the only way to hold both pro and anti establishment views is to also hold to a steadfast belief that there is a very narrow and clear line between a benevolent establishment you should yield to, and a corrupt one you should resist. Which is to say, you shouldn't need guns, except if you live in Nazi Germany or know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years. If Vernon had suggested that Harry asks Professor McGonagall, a "good coded" authority figure, would have Harry laughed him off?
But even that is hardly followed in Harry Potter. As while it's hard to know what would have happened if the heroes had yielded, the books seem to make a very broad anti-establishment point frequently, rewarding the heroes rebelling against the orders of even benevolent authorities. For instance, not sheltering when ordered to by Dumbledore and fighting a troll to save Hermione.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Yes, but the form of the justification is important in maintaining a functional liberty-minded society, in which the social contract is something like "You and I probably have different ideas and values as to how we should live our lives, so let's just agree on a minimal set of coercive laws so that we can be peaceful neighbors."
Now functionally, in practice, there can be severe disagreements as to what should be part of the minimum set of laws; there's non-ridiculous arguments to be made that allowing people to stockpile a military arsenal can make their neighbor fearful and not able to coexist peacefully, or that someone removing "just a clump of cells" is depriving a being of life. But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.
Because at that point, the polite covenent of let's just be neighbors and leave one another alone is irreparably broken.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?
Here, there are exceptions for kids working for their family's business (provided the family business does not employ 10 people or more), newspaper delivery, tutoring, babysitting or working for a nonprofit.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
To be charitable to @faceh 's point, I think it could probably be described as 9-10 men string along 6-7-8 women (otherwise good marriageble women) without pairing with them. 6-7-8 women believe, both because they get some attention from 9-10 men and because society keeps repeating it to them, that they are worth 9-10 men and should not settle for less. 6-7-8 men find themselves unable to find a 6-7-8 woman to pair with, so they end up single or pairing with 4-5 women. 4-5 men face a similar dillemma and at the bottom you find men without even the option of settling for less because there is nothing left.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Have you not heard about the recent, RADICAL political polarization among young women?
These women ALSO largely refuse to date conservative/Republican men.
So men don't HAVE to filter these women out, these women are filtering THEMSELVES out. And they go on social media and aggressively police other women on this issue.
No, they say they refuse to date conservative/Republican men. What they actually do is refuse to date conservative/Republican boys.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
So, to sum up, the accusation that a project of this sort is "LARP-y" is kind of irrelevant. Yes, it'll be LARP-y to start with; it kind of has to be. That's how things work. It's a phase — a necessary phase in the process of becoming something more, and if the people involved stay determined enough, and keep it up long enough, that phase will pass, and it will become something more.
The word that's underlying the LARP accusation is "unserious". Maybe the participants don't have to be serious about it all the time, but certainly if one is trying to build an enduring organisation they have to be serious. It would be a tremendous insult to early christians to call their faith unserious considering the hardships they went through for it. Jesus' crucifixion is certainly serious. The pledge of allegiance being recited unseriously by kids is one thing, but the man who wrote it certainly thought it was a serious tool to build patriotic spirit.
I'm not making a judgement on whether new "right-wing" organisations are serious or not, but I think the idea that the people building them have to be serious to be successful has not been debunked here.
I wouldn't be sure about either one of Russia and China. I can't find any indication it has changed since then, but it was late Soviet policy to operate its SSBNs from "bastions", highly guarded areas in friendly waters. The noisy environment this created made the comparatively less stealthy Soviet SSBNs stand out less than they would on their own. On their own, they would have an SSN shadowing them, ready to sink them within minutes of war being declared.
China's SSBNs are pretty crude designs for now, decades behind the west. Though of course, they iterate quickly and can be expected to catch up quite fast, assuming they're getting some help from Russia which is not as far behind the west. And that they have homegrown SSBNs at all is no small feat. But considering how noisy they are, they would not feel comfortable operating them outside of safe areas either, meaning they are believed to also operate on a "bastion" doctrine.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
I would say it's true. It's just that "trustworthy" is a bigger concept to unpack than it looks like. Being trustworthy is not like dateless guys thinking they're a catch because they're a "feminist ally" or because they think that it's all so easy not to be an asshole and that if they had a girlfriend/wife they wouldn't be abusive to her and wouldn't cheat on her, etc...
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested. It's easy to think you'd never ever cheat, if you've never had the opportunity to, if you've never been on the receiving end of an attractive woman signaling she'd be up for no-strings-attached sex.
Being trustworthy means being reliable and having your shit together, and making women at ease in your presence.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
So exactly as he said.
It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
2rafa did mention the unconsciously based in passing, I was just pointing out that I don't think it's an exercise in mental masturbation to analyse it but rather a window into an internal conflict in the author. I wouldn't be so quick in saying that JK Rowling doesn't believe unconsciously that real teenagers should be armed. She probably will never admit it. But I think her bedrock beliefs would lead her to that position, because when she tried to write a story in coherent universe she built herself it naturally led her there. She will only persist in claiming the opposite because the anti-gun/gun control was strongly imprinted onto her by the society she grew up in.
pigeonburger
22d ago
Personally, I've been hit by the thunderbolt before, but I think it's not an indicator of any kind of compatibility, but our biology's attempt at getting people who are failing to pair bond to reproduce regardless.
Yeah, wheels add volume and weight to the luggage that is not required at all times (most of the use time of luggage is spent not being wheeled around). Weight and volume that travelers pay for in one way or another. The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality, with little way for the customer to know whether this luggage's wheel are durable, or if they will start blocking and dragging everywhere after 3 trips.
Though my experience of wheeled luggages breaking all the time might be personal; coming from a city with a lot of snow and ice, slippery surfaces are dealt with with pebbles, sand, salts/other chemicals, which remain on streets, sidewalk and indoors floors where people come in with their outdoor shoes (airports, shopping malls, hotel lobbies) for a significant portion of the year, even after the snow and ice are gone. These wreak havoc on small wheels.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
I'm sorry man, that sucks. I didn't even have that traumatic of an experience and I still could not muster to do better for most of my adult life.
I wish I had better advice for you than what you've been probably hearing. I hope you can get over at least the personal aspect of it; as for the world, it tends to be at least a bit kinder to men when we get older.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
It also helps that Israel's enemies also have a habit of chanting "Death to America" and have frequently killed American servicemen over the past several decades.
While in general I agree with your point, I'd point out that there's likely a reversed cause and effect here. America doesn't support Israel because its enemies chant "Death to America", Israel's enemies chant "Death to America" because America supports Israel.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
Being term-limited and on his last term, Trump is unmoved by the electoral concerns of other, future Republicans. What he cares about at this point is legacy, and integrating the second largest country on earth, becoming the largest country on earth in the process, is pretty legacy-setting.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
I think the point is that either one Trump would consider a win. I don't know why people think they have to pin a specific intent to the tariffs. Trump is looking for any win, not a specific one. Trump believes tariffs not destructive the way most economists seem to believe they are; that genuine belief opens up a lot of options for him than for someone for whom it would be an obvious bluff. Companies stop shipping to the US and industry reshores? That's a win. Companies still ship to the US? That's new revenue for the government. Countries negociate a new trade deal to dodge tariffs that's more advantageous to the US than the status quo? That's a win too.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
And no the left did not completely dominate the media landscape back then.
They wrote the movies, tv shows, books, music and ran the schools. Has there ever been a time in a millenial's life where popular Western media depicted someone who thinks there should be less immigrants in his Western country in a positive light?
But the factors are not beyond their control. Guys can decide to start going out, making friends and meeting them IRL. Just because society won't push them to do it as it maybe once did (it's debatable), doesn't mean it cannot be done or that it's even harder than it used to be. It's the same as weight issues; sedentary lifestyles and easy/cheap hyper-palatable high calories options means that if someone doesn't make any effort, unless they've been blessed with excellent genetics, they will gain weight. But it's hardly an immutable prophecy, people can have a good diet, can exercise. In fact, having a good diet and exercising is even easier than ever before in history.
Having a diverse social life is the same. Internalise that locus of control. CHR is a stat that needs exercising, just like STR.
I share in The_Nybbler's frustration because it seems like the only way the right gets what it wants is if it has control of absolutely every branch and level of government, including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own). If even ONE of them remains in the hands of the right, then sorry, not only the fucking machines remain, but some local judge is going to rule that the whole country has to hire more fucking machines.
Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?
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